On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 2:09 PM, Martin Poulter
<infobomb@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I realise that I hadn’t set out expectations for last week’s training
workshop, and what we’re doing with the Train the Trainers programme.
So, with my apologies for that, here is quite a long essay about how I
personally see it, which I’m sharing with the community as a whole.
I've put it at <http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MartinPoulter/Training_on_one_leg>
in case you'd prefer to read it on-wiki.
We’re already delivering training in various contexts. A lot of it is
professional quality, because Wikimedia UK is very lucky in the amount
of expertise and experience we have available. However, our luck won’t
always hold, and we need to be serious and systematic.
In the long term we want our training programme to be flexible,
sustainable, professional quality, credible, and owned by the
community. It will be trapezoid shape: an “upper” layer training and
accrediting another layer of trainers, cascading skills and knowledge
through a system that ultimately reaches a large volume of training
recipients. Since WMUK has diverse training needs and we each have
different, complementary skills, our training will be diverse,
avoiding any kind of “one size fits all”. People will be able to
specialise in GLAM outreach, education outreach, events for other
experienced Wikimedians, or whatever they’re best at. They’ll also be
encouraged to develop individual approaches to training based on their
own strengths.
This all means we are going to have to train and accredit people who
train and accredit people who train and accredit... indefinitely. I’ll
call this the Hard Problem. The training workshops last week and
forthcoming in October are our first stab at tackling the Hard
Problem.
We were invited to take part *both* as participants in the training
and as observers of the process. As a participant, I found myself
often thinking “I already knew that” or “I wouldn’t want to do that in
my training”, but I picked up some useful tips and suggestions. It was
as an observer that I really learnt an enormous amount.
We spent a lot of time on social skills: Candy acted in a role as a
terrible presenter, and we had to give feedback. There was feedback on
the feedback, and we discussed the process of giving feedback on the
feedback -very meta! People were generally very good at this task, but
we had to address it.
If you do a lot of training for WMUK, you will face that situation for
real at some point. Someone very like Candy’s character will come to
you. They’ll be wildly enthusiastic about getting their town or their
local society involved with Wikimedia, but they won’t yet have
developed crucial skills. You’ll have to handle that in a way that
avoids wasting that person’s enthusiasm. Wikimedia UK won’t come in
and sort this out: as the trusted volunteer, you will *be* Wikimedia
UK in that situation.
You might even see this problem at a meta level, if a colleague gives
an enthusiastic volunteer really unhelpful feedback which discourages
them. You’ll need to give feedback on the feedback.
We discussed conveying professionalism and authority, and how this has
to be interpreted differently when talking to t-shirted sysadmins or
sharply-suited legal professionals. One participant thought this part
of the training wasn’t relevant to them. At the time, that set off an
alarm bell in my mind, but it seems that over the course of the
weekend this person did come to see this as something they needed to
think about and see that it only meant a small change to what they
were doing.
There was an assessment and accreditation aspect to the weekend. Even
when you already have skilled trainers, this is important. Some people
are excellent at training but don’t know they are, and we saw this
among our group. As a community of trainers, we need to build
confidence in each other, and also to see that people approach
training in distinctive ways. That was a very valuable aspect of what
happened in the workshop.
We talked about coping when things go wrong. If you do lots of
training for WMUK, at some point you’ll be in a room with librarians
or archivists who have the misconception that you’re there to
undermine their jobs. Or the event organiser will have given you the
wrong impression about the audience and what they are expecting.
You’ll find yourself having meticulously prepared a session but
ditching it and going back to first principles.
To boil it down, I’d say that to help with the Hard Problem, we’re
above all looking for trainers who can train people to draw cartoon
sheep on a whiteboard.
Some people will have a very negative reaction to that last paragraph.
They’ll tell us that Wikipedia doesn’t require people to draw cartoon
sheep, that WMUK has no identified training need for cartoon sheep
skills, and that the very idea is a nonsensical distraction from our
mission. That’s the reaction I used to have. In a way, that reaction
is an acid test.
If you do a lot of training for WMUK, at some point you’ll be in a
room with people who have been sitting at their computers all day, are
getting restless, and are just not seeing the point you’re trying to
make about good faith collaboration. You’ll need some activity that
gets them on their feet, is fun and memorable, and non-intimidating.
Cartoon sheep, or something similar, are ideal. People don’t need any
specialist jargon or cultural background to understand the task. It’s
a good task for showing people that:
* they can get better at *anything* through practice
* even in a highly constrained task, people can show a distinctive
personality, even eccentricity
* doing a good job involves being prepared to erase your previous work
and start again
* relentlessly negative and relentlessly positive feedback.are both
undesirable for different reasons
If you wanted to teach people about being a Wikipedia admin, one way
to start would be to get them to draw their best cartoon sheep. Then
without warning you could summarily erase all the sheep. That would
kick off a discussion of how people feel about having their work
deleted, and how we should prepare them for it. I hope we don’t have
WMUK trainers who think that being a WP admin is something you do “on
the computer” and therefore all the training has to take place at the
computer.
I could go on and on about how cartoon sheep are useful in WMUK
training, and I’d still miss all the benefits that better trainers can
see. With some imagination you could say the same about card games,
improvised comedy sketches, or circus skills: at work, I once attended
an enjoyable hour-long training session on how to stand on one leg. I
work at a university, not a circus, but hopefully by now I don’t need
to explain why that was a good session.
So as I said, people’s reaction to the sheep suggestion is an acid
test. If you think it’s nonsense, you may well be excellent at showing
people how to use Wikipedia, but I’m interested in the Hard Problem,
and for that WMUK needs people who take the expansive view of
training. Yes, there are decisions to be made about which Wikipedia
policies newcomers should learn about in their first session, what to
put in the handouts in a session for university managers, or what the
training needs of our partner organisations are. These need attention,
but they’re the easy problems. We’ve solved them already or we have
the collective expertise to. If you’re an experienced Wikimedian and
trainer and you think you need dedicated training for these issues,
you probably have too low a view of your own expertise.
If you were at the workshop last week, please write up the activities
you’ve devised in the relevant section of the WMUK site: see
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/For_trainers . My ideas for activities to
do with school teachers are written up at
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_for_schools_workshop . I’ve
used wrong terminology in places, and I’m terrible at estimating how
long an activity will last, but I’m hoping those improvements will
come through the wiki process. Think about what events you could run
with partner organisations, with other Wikimedians, or other
audiences. We all have different interests and if we work as a
community to design and deliver new events, we could rapidly build up
an impressive training programme for Wikimedia UK.
The feedback we’ll get from the trainers, individually and as
Wikimedia UK, will help us find the roles we’re suited for in the
overall picture, and so help us towards that long-term goal I talked
about.
I hope everyone training for WMUK will keep a reflective log: to write
down, for each training experience, a few bullet points about what
went well and about what you could do differently or better next time.
This is private to you, for personal reflection, but you should be
prepared to discuss it with a mentor as part of future accreditation,
or show it to someone you’re mentoring as an example of reflective
practice.
If you were not at the workshop, but you’re interested in being
involved in WMUK’s training programme, I urge you to sign up for the
weekend in October. Whether you’re already an outstanding trainer,
just beginning, or somewhere imbetween, it will give you opportunities
to learn a great deal, and above all WMUK will benefit from your
input. There will be an accreditation process with a chance to get
individual feedback and a certificate: professional quality work
should not just be done, but be seen to be done.
...and I don't want to give this secret away too widely, but it was a
really enjoyable weekend spent with people whose company I enjoy.
--
Dr Martin L Poulter
Volunteer, Wikimedia UK http://uk.wikimedia.org/
Wikipedia contributor
http://enwp.org/User:MartinPoulter
Musician
http://myspace.com/comapilot
Person http://infobomb.org/
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